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NO, ECONOMIC POPULISM DID NOT LOSE THIS ELECTION  
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Isaac Rabbani, Domenico Siravo
December 24, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Over the course of her campaign, with all the wrong people in her
ear, Kamala Harris rejected the type of economic populism that could
have salvaged last month’s elections. _

Vice President Kamala Harris at Prince George's County Community
College in Largo, Maryland, on Tuesday, December 17, 2024., Annabelle
Gordon / UPI / Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

As a flurry of questions continues to swirl in the wake of Trump’s
second victory, one topic that has been the subject of much debate,
once again, is populism. Google searches for the term roughly
quadrupled
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in the days following the election.

Ever since Trump’s first victory in 2016, commentators, politicians,
and activists of all stripes have been fiercely debating the p-word.
But now it’s reached fever pitch, especially as it relates to the
Democratic Party itself. How populist was the Kamala Harris 2024
campaign, and how populist should it have been? And more broadly, how
populist has the Democratic Party as a whole been, and how populist
should it even be, if at all?

Having conducted four years of research on just these questions, the
Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) is uniquely positioned to
weigh in. Here’s what the data can tell us about how we got here,
and where we ought to go next.

Economic Populism Works

What is economic populism? It is rhetoric consisting of two elements.
First, it is a vocal recognition of the working class, its
contributions to the economy, and its entitlement to a comfortable
standard of living. On the flip side, an economic populist also points
out villains — namely, the economic elites that _prevent _workers
from attaining what they deserve.

To be clear, this is not an arbitrary set of criteria, but contains
real substance. Raising up the working class is important but is
ultimately just talk: We live in a world where politicians of all
persuasions name-check the working class at every turn. (Perhaps
twenty years ago this would set one apart, but no longer.) On the
other hand, going after elites demonstrates one’s willingness to
turn down votes, to turn down money — in short, to make enemies with
the rich. A costly signal is an effective signal.

This formulation of economic populism bears empirical support as well.
Last year, CWCP released a report
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Democratic rhetoric in the 2022 midterms. Across a variety of
statistical specifications, and accounting for an array of district
characteristics, we found that naming and shaming economic elites
increased a candidate’s level of working-class support
significantly.

We’ve also tested the impact of this rhetoric in randomized
experiments. In a study conducted in 2021, we found that populist,
economically progressive rhetoric, delivered in plain-spoken,
universalist language, was preferred to various alternatives. In a
follow-up experiment from 2023, we further found that economic
populism is popular among working-class voters and doesn’t push away
non-working-class voters.

Perhaps most important, a message test on Pennsylvania voters the
month before the election showed that economic populist messaging
performed best
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and did significantly better than messaging around “protecting
democracy.” Yet the Harris campaign frequently deployed the latter.

It Was Not an Economic Populist Campaign

In spite of what some commentators have claimed, Harris simply was not
an economic populist candidate.

A new analysis
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of Harris’s rhetoric decisively shows that over the course of the
campaign, she deployed less and less populist language, instead opting
for more messaging around protecting democracy. With fewer than three
weeks until the election, the campaign reportedly refused
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to air what its super PAC found to be its most effective ad
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attacking landlords and price gougers for making it too hard to get
by. According to Biden campaign insiders
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decisions like this were at the explicit behest of Uber leadership —
whose chief legal officer is Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law — and
other well-connected individuals.

Nor did the Harris campaign offer a particularly ambitious policy
agenda. Its core mantra was the “opportunity economy,” nine
syllables that convey essentially nothing. As we have argued elsewhere
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— and contra perpetual claims that the Dems just need to moderate
— backing up economic populist rhetoric with bold policy is
essential to demonstrating to working-class voters that a candidate
can actually deliver on promises.

And it certainly did not help that Harris took office in 2021 saddled
with the unpopular rhetoric from her short-lived primary campaign.
Indeed, our 2021 study found that Harris’s messaging style at the
time — economically moderate but “woke” in affect — was least
popular of all the alternatives that we tested. Perhaps she could have
shed this reputation, except that throughout Joe Biden’s
administration, she was forced to toe his line. Which brings us to the
next issue.

It Was Not an Economic Populist Presidency

During the final weeks of her campaign, Harris still refused to
distance herself from any aspect of an unpopular Biden administration,
notoriously saying “there is not a thing
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that comes to mind” that she would have done differently. If Harris
was willing to tie her campaign’s fate to the accomplishments of
President Biden, was it because he had espoused and enacted an
economic populist vision?

Now, in Biden’s defense, Build Back Better _began_ as a significant
expansion of the social safety net, and one that could have perhaps
alleviated the economic malaise
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of the last four years. But as we have argued elsewhere
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the policies that ultimately passed — the Infrastructure Investment
and Jobs Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — while
steps in the right direction, were simply not ambitious enough to
demonstrate that the party is serious about delivering for the working
class.

To the extent that the Biden administration _was _on the side of
workers, it did not communicate this effectively. His mental state
rapidly decaying, Biden was simply not capable of connecting with the
people to convey his economic vision. Further, the administration did
not advertise its wins. Contrast New Deal programs like the Works
Progress Administration, whose initials were found at the site of
every public project it created, with the Inflation Reduction Act,
whose positive impacts went largely unnoticed. One analysis
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of the administration’s Twitter communications found that officials
largely abandoned a focus on Build Back Better as they pivoted to
other priorities like the budget deficit.

Nor did Democrats as a whole put forward a populist narrative. Our
analysis
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of 2022 midterm candidates found that less than 20 percent of Dems
attacked large corporations, billionaires, Wall Street, or price
gouging. Less than 15 percent went after corporate money in politics,
and less than 5 percent went after corporate greed, big banks, or the
top 1 percent. A breakdown of Democrats’ television ads showed
similar results
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We also found that barely any Democratic candidates were working class
themselves — not a good look for a wannabe workers’ party.

Far from a populist narrative, for much of the Biden presidency it
appeared that Dem leadership had no narrative at all. In the face of a
populace reeling from inflation
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as well as from the expirations
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of the child tax credit expansion, extended unemployment insurance,
and enhanced Medicaid and SNAP benefits — the attitude of the
president, party, and punditry
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appeared to be: “Keep moving, nothing to see here.”

In sum, Biden did not communicate a working-class-oriented vision of
the economy, nor did he translate his limited wins to the public, nor
acknowledge the economic hardship so many have faced. His exiting the
race so late made it that much harder for Kamala Harris (or any
candidate) to disentangle herself from this image — but regardless,
the damage was done.

Going forward, Democrats face an uphill battle. Amid the cacophony of
a frenetic media, eager to drown out people’s real concerns with the
latest culture-war content, it will be difficult for Democrats to
rebuild their reputation
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the party of workers. Decades of dealignment are not going to be
undone quickly or easily.

It will take a unified, aggressive rhetoric to break through the
noise. It will take a bold policy agenda, and a coalition of
working-class candidates and unions fighting for it. This is no small
task — but the alternatives to it look grimmer by the day.

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Isaac Rabbani is an economist and a researcher at the Center for
Working-Class Politics

Domenico Siravo is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class
Politics.

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* Working Class Politics; Democrats; Populism; Biden/Harris;
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